The pears were all in blossom in dense sheets of snow, and only tips of green were visible here and there. To save the blooms from the frost, Burbidge had put some tiffany in front of the trees, and fixed down the coarse muslin-like stuff by laths of wood. There were also cordons of pears running athwart the wall, and over these to protect them he had put fir branches. These pears are of the magnificent early dessert sorts such as Clapp's Favourite, Williams' Bon Chrétien, Souvenir de Congrès, and beside these we have the earliest variety of all, the delicious little Citron des Carmês, which often yields a dish of pears the first week in August, before, so to speak, one has begun to realize that summer is fleeting. On entering our little kitchen garden, there is a hedge of roses on each side trained against some iron rails. On one side ramps the delightful Gloire de Dijon roses with all its many tinted blossoms of orange, creamy white, and buff shades; on the other, is a hedge of the superb old General Jacqueminot. The General is a magnificent summer blossomer, he flowers in June even in Shropshire, and his flowers are of the richest, fullest, crimson, and of delicious sweetness--not as large as many of the new hybrid perpetual sorts, but General Jacqueminot's rich red is of extreme beauty, and whatsoever the season he always blossoms, and the scent is one of the sweetest known. Then I paused to stop at my bed of Ranunculi, a flower which once was held in great favour by English gardeners, but which now seldom finds a place in English _parterres_. Nothing could be seen but a few little curly leaves like sprouting parsley, but later I hoped for and expected a glory of colour. I grow all colours, crimson, vermilion, salmon, pink, fawn, cherry and black, and some are of the darkest shade of sumptuous orange. [Sidenote: THE VISIT TO CLUN] These flowers are often found in old Italian Church work, and I have read they were brought to Venice by the Moors, and so introduced into Italy. I found Burbidge waiting for me as I came up to him. He said he was pleased to see me. I had not seen the old man in the garden for some weeks. He had been ill since his visit to Clun, and I had only seen him in bed, and then in the presence of his old wife Hester--an austere middle-aged woman "given to chapel ways," as Burbidge expresses it, so I had heard nothing fresh of Benjamin or of his granddaughter Sal. After we had settled the kinds of dahlias, and how best to sow the sweet-peas, which last were to be sown in separate groups in lines, I called my old gardener aside, away from "his boys" as he calls them, although Roderick Pugh and Absolom Preece are middle-aged men, and asked him in a whisper about his visit to Clun. "Was your brother better?" I asked. "Anyway, tell me about them all."